Cane's Smits, Prince and Cidre

October
2007

By CONTACT _Con-3F4A1850B c s l Mansha Daswani

Jimmy
Smits has starred in some of television’s most acclaimed series from L.A.
Law to NYPD
Blue to The
West Wing.
Previously to be found in supporting-actor roles, Smits takes center stage in Cane, a new drama from CBS Paramount Network
Television. In the series, which Smits is also co-executive-producing, he plays
Alex Vega, the adopted son of an affluent Cuban American family that runs a
sugar-and-rum empire in Florida. With a cast that includes Hector Elizondo as
Pancho, the ailing family patriarch who chooses Alex as his heir over his
biological sons; Rita Moreno as Pancho’s wife Amalia and Nestor Carbonell as
Alex’s resentful brother Frank, the series has the weight of CBS’s marketing
machine behind it. Smits talks to World Screen about his hopes for the show.

WS: What first attracted you to this project?

SMITS: The role and the script were my guideposts for jumping on
board. It was a fleshed-out character and something that was a little different
than what I’d done before in series television. There was also a comfort zone I
had with Cynthia [Cidre, the show’s creator] because we’d worked together
before. She’s a Latino writer so I’ve kept track of her through the years.

I’m very
excited about what we’re doing and I look at the call sheet every morning and I
see Rita’s and Hector’s names and they’re iconic figures to me in the Latino
community and the artistic community. We just assembled a 3- to 4-minute promo
that is going inside the pilot, to show this is what you can expect from Cane this season. We showed it to the
crew and I got so emotional because they were so jazzed by what they’d seen. It
made me know in my heart that I’m doing the right thing.

WS: The relationships your character has with his wife, brother and father
are central to the series. Do you see any one as being more important than the
others?

SMITS: I look at it as spokes in a wheel—they all keep that wheel
rolling. The great thing about series television is that it’s very fluid and
there are a lot of things that come into play that will effect and change
things down the line. On a week-to-week basis, as the writers are looking at
the dailies, certain relationships pop. And then the audience factor comes into
play. It’s strange right now [before the show has gone to air] because we’re
[working] in a little bit of a vacuum.

WS: Early on, your character orders a hit out on someone who threatens his
family. How do you think viewers will respond to this character, especially
given the other kinds of roles you’ve played in the past?

SMITS: If they’re not ready they’re going to have to be ready,
because that’s what we’re serving up! It was by design in terms of my picking
this project. I feel very challenged by this role and on an episode-to-episode
basis, we’re peeling [layers] away and discovering new things about the guy and
how we’re going to navigate the waters with him. I see him as being very
conflicted. He’s somebody with a very strong moral compass and sense of family
and all these psychological conflicts that he might have, not being the
biological son [of this family and being] the heir to the empire. That makes
for a character that is, hopefully, textured. I hope audiences see that when he
does things, they’re justified. That’s what he has to do for his family.

WS: The press has already made comparisons to Dallas and The Sopranos. What’s your reaction to that?

SMITS: When The Sopranos premiered, they did the Godfather references. You guys feel like
you need to box things in. Does it have elements of Dallas? I guess in the fact that it’s a
nighttime serialized show. I don’t think of ourselves as a nighttime soap; I
hope we’re not going to have women jumping in pools having fights. But Dallas
was one of the
top shows around, so we should be so lucky in terms of viewer response. You’d
be hard-pressed to make that type of show for that [time slot] nowadays.

With
regards to The Sopranos comparison—we’re not a crime family. What made The Sopranos fascinating is that you knew this
was a crime family. Cane’s is a very upscale, affluent, successful business family that’s
going through an internal crisis because of what’s happening with the patriarch
and the business alliances that they have with their competitors.

WS: How supportive has the network been?

SMITS: Very supportive. Promotionally, the network couldn’t have
been better. They’re involved in it a lot, they micromanage, that’s part of the
deal with them. And there are ups and downs to that but it’s what you have to
deal with. We don’t have the kind of track record that a Steven Bochco or a
John Wells or a David E. Kelley or a David Milch—all those people I’ve
worked with before—have. We have to interface a lot more with the studio
and the network. And it’s been very harmonious.

WS: How do you balance being the star of the show and the executive
producer?

SMITS: It’s been a real exercise in time management and I’m
discovering how to try to deal with that on a day-to-day basis. It’s been
tough, very challenging and fulfilling in a lot of different ways. [Executive-producing
is] where I’ve been going in the past couple of years, career-wise, with the
production deals I’ve had with other networks. I just have to find where my
voice is best-suited.

After
working on American Dreams, the NBC drama set against the backdrop of the Vietnam
War, producer Jonathan Prince set his sights on developing a Godfather-inspired show about an upscale
Latino family. It was pitched to Nina Tassler, CBS Entertainment’s president,
who enlisted Cuban-American writer Cynthia Cidre, whose credits include The
Mambo Kings, to
come on board to further develop the idea and write the pilot script for Cane, which launched on CBS last
month.

WS: What was the inspiration for the series?

CIDRE: Polly Anthony and Jonathan Prince had this idea of doing a show about
a Mexican family in the food business. They called me and I said no, I don’t
want to do it. I’d done the whole Latino thing before and the time was never
right. And then somehow they talked me into it. I came up with a story and told
it to Nina Tassler and she said, “We love this.” And then she called me up an
hour later and said, “Why are we doing a show about a Mexican family in the
food business when you’re Cuban? Let’s make it about Cubans.” I thought, if
we’re doing the Cuban show, and we’re in Florida, what’s the sexiest thing I
can think of? I immediately thought of rum. That opened tremendous doors [to
potential story lines]. And I always wanted to do a King Lear-ish story, where
there was a patriarch passing on his legacy and dividing the kingdom among his
children. And then my father was a sugar chemist in Cuba, so I know how rum is
made. The rest tumbled into place.

WS: How did the cast come together?

PRINCE: CBS greenlit the pilot around the same time that Jimmy Smits heard
about it. We all realized that he would take us from being just a pilot to
being a very special pilot. Obviously when you have a cast like that early on,
more people want to be a part of it. Suddenly names like Rita Moreno, Hector
Elizondo, Nestor Carbonell, Polly Walker from Rome, all of them wanted to be a part
of it. All the bees come to the picnic when there’s a big flower in the
middle—and that’s Jimmy Smits. We then brought in the director Christian
Duguay. He’s French Canadian and has done only mini-series—he had never
done a pilot. It feels epic, the word saga comes to mind, it feels big and
sprawling, like Dallas was a series. But it also feels very personal and intimate.

WS: Did you have actors in mind when you were developing the story line?

CIDRE: I’ve been writing for 29 years and people always ask me
that and for some bizarre reason, I don’t. I always write blind. I write to some
fictional person in my head.

WS: Given that it is a serialized drama, do you have the entire season
mapped out already?

PRINCE: It’s tricky because you’re shooting episode six while
episode one goes on the air for the first time. It’s a difficult business to
anticipate what people will want when they watch this show. Will the appetite
be to tell a sprawling brother-versus-brother story? Will the desire be to tell
more of the darker crime stories as Jimmy Smits’s character is sort of a Jekyll
and Hyde? The Dr. Jekyll side of him is a family man and a businessman in the
rum and the sugar businesses. He believes in ethanol and General Motors is his
partner and he’s an upscale guy. And Mr. Hyde is this down-and-dirty guy that
feels comfortable killing people. Do people want a version of Dallas set in South Florida? I’m
reminded of those guys, when I walk down Venice Beach, that have these eight or
ten sticks and on top of them they are swirling plates. I keep thinking to
myself, [these themes in the show are all] swirling plates and we have to keep
them all spinning at least in the first six to eight episodes.

Broadcast
television—not cable, not HBO—is different. You don’t get to do the
show the way that you want it and so what if nobody watches. My job as a showrunner
on a big CBS show is to have a series that is so successful that advertisers
want to pay lots of money to run 30-­second
commercials. Can you be good and popular? Sure, there are lots of shows in the
history of television that have been good and popular. But you have to be more
popular than The Sopranos because that [didn’t have] enough viewers to be a hit on
CBS. And you have to be more intimate and post-modern in your execution than Dallas or Dynasty because shows like that would be
laughed at now.

WS: Can you tell me more about Jimmy Smits’s role and the character you
developed for him, as a family man who does appear to do some very bad things?
PRINCE: He’s Batman. When he is good and
rich and a great dad and all those things, he’s Bruce Wayne. But from within
him there’s a vigilante, justice-seeking dark knight.

[James] Gandolfini played a bad guy [on The Sopranos] who didn’t really have a Bruce
Wayne side. On a good day, he only slept with two hookers! Jimmy Smits’s
character is a loving father. He’s only bad when it comes to good causes. It’s
revenging the death of his little sister. It’s protecting people in his family
and his community. The writing has to be deft enough that we have situations
where people are rooting for Bruce Wayne to become Batman, not hoping that he
won’t.

WS: Music plays a big part in the show.

PRINCE: The youngest son owns a nightclub in South Beach, so that
can be a place where people could play music. People like Daddy Yankee and Mary
J. Blige and Alicia Keys could perform in this club, setting the stage for a
musical canvas to paint on. And the show airs on Tuesday nights and Tuesday
happens to be the day when people release their new records. So you get the
record companies promoting our show with their artists.

WS: How do you think Cane will play outside of the U.S.?

PRINCE: You have a wealthy family and I think that translates well. I think
aspirational, upscale living always translates well. Florida translates
well—look at the success of CSI: Miami and Miami Vice. And I think the immigrant
culture is more important than the Latino culture. [These are] people who are
longing for a homeland, who came to a new place and have assimilated enough to
be millionaires, but have not assimilated enough to give up their culture. That
is going to resonate, whether you’re Irish American or you’re a Kenyan who
lives in London or a Jamaican living in Berlin.

WS: How much does the full-season pickup weigh on your mind?

CIDRE: I learned a long time ago that the only control you have
is over what’s on your page. You put your name on a script. You’re proud of
what you’ve done, you take pride in your work and you let it go. I used to
agonize the first 15 years, and then I got over agonizing. You move onto the
next job. It’s out of my control.

PRINCE: At some point your plates are spinning, your music is playing, your
actors are there, your writers are writing, and you just look up in the sky and
you think, alright, let’s see what happens. Fate decides these things. It’s
capricious. If any of us knew what a hit looked like before it became a hit,
our jobs would be so much easier—we’d only write hit shows! You just say,
I’ll put all those things in, I’ll mix them up and I’ll put them in the oven,
and if people come and eat the cake and they like it, great! If they don’t,
then the effort has integrity. You were kind to your crew and you treated
people well and you wrote good stuff. That’s my approach to show-running in
general.